


Armistice

by inlovewithnight



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-01
Updated: 2006-05-01
Packaged: 2017-10-15 21:43:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/165213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>AU from "The Captain's Hand"</p>
    </blockquote>





	Armistice

**Author's Note:**

> AU from "The Captain's Hand"

"Congratulations, Commander." Tigh steps up to the glass, squinting through it into the brig. "A Cylon prisoner of your very own. Just like the old man."

Lee frowns and presses the button to darken the glass, cutting off the colonel's view. "Hopefully this one won't get to me like his did."

Tigh stares at him, and Lee braces himself for a rebuke, but instead receives a slow nod. "I hope so too. Be careful with it." Tigh looks back at the opaque glass, hiding the Cylon from view. "They'll frak with your head if you let 'em."

"I know." Lee stares at the glass as well, picturing the thing on the other side, already planning his strategy. "I won't let it."  
***  
Commanding the Pegasus comes with silver on your collar and ghosts in your bunk. If he doesn't fall into bed exhausted enough to be asleep before his head hits the pillow, Cain and Fisk and Garner hover over him for hours, telling him to watch his back. Telling him he's drawn a bad hand and he's frakked, pure and simple. Telling him he needs to be a hell of a lot more paranoid if he doesn't want to end up dead.

He isn't entirely and absolutely sure that he doesn't want to end up dead.  
***  
The Cylon has the form of a woman, with soft blonde hair and wide blue eyes, and he refuses to let himself find anything familiar about her. It. Not her. It has to remain a thing. It is a thing.

The Marines inform him that this is the same model they had prisoner in this cell before, under Admiral Cain. "We broke the other one," they say. "We have a technique, you might say."

"Your technique yielded exactly no useful information last time," he tells them. "I'll do this my way."

He's the Commander. His word is law. They salute and leave.

He'll interrogate the prisoner alone.  
***  
He reports to Galactica once a week, for a full debriefing and dinner with the old man. Sometimes he has a drink with Kara and one or two of the pilots. It isn't really appropriate, though, and unless Kara catches him and twists his arm, he visits his father and then leaves without speaking to anyone.

Dualla visits Pegasus when she has leave, when she can, and once they meet on Cloud Nine for a night and a day. Only once, though; the way things are, a commander can't leave his ship for long.

His duty is on Pegasus and his family is on Galactica and neither ship is his home.  
***  
He asks if she has a name, and she laughs at him. It's a bad start.

She won't give an alias, and he needs something to structure his notes, so he starts to call her Anne. Only in writing, never aloud, but he has the oddest feeling, when he glances up at her after writing the name again, that she knows and approves.

He gets that eerie feeling often, that she's reading his mind, catching his thoughts, monitoring his emotions. No reaction ever seems to surprise her, or cause a tremor in her smile.

"We have a lot in common, you and I," she says.

"I don't think so," he replies, and she smiles even wider.  
***  
It hits him the next time he goes to Galactica: Anne was his father's second wife, an absurdly kind and nervous woman who treated her stepsons like an exotic, delicate, and potentially dangerous species of animal.

He's too tired to invent an excuse to keep the notes long enough to change the names. He just hands them over to the Admiral as they are. When his father glances up at him, startled and pained, he shrugs.

What can he say? What can he do?

He asks those questions every day, anymore, and there's never an answer.  
***  
She likes to talk. Loves the sound of her own godsdamned voice, as far as he can see. He's likely to wear out his hand, trying to keep up with writing everything she says. No electronics in the room with the Cylon, just in case.

"Your ignorance is staggering," she tells him.

The Marines say that she only likes to talk to _him_. She ignores everyone else, what efforts they make from beyond the perimeter Lee ordered established early on. He won't have anyone abusing this prisoner, _his_ prisoner. That ruined everything last time, and anyway, there are lines that simple humanity dictates not be crossed.

If he told her that, she would laugh at him again.  
***  
At night in his cabin, recording observations and analysis to accompany his notes, he catches his thoughts taking paths that they shouldn't, lingering on her face, her eyes, the curves of her body under the sweats they've given her to wear.

Impossible thoughts, appalling thoughts (that thing massacred his race and is no more human than the fans that bring stale air to the cell), but virulent, persistent, contaminating thoughts that follow him from the desk to the bunk and into his dreams.  
***  
She's frighteningly intelligent, and not just in the ways he expects from a computer.

Philosophy, theology, abstract thought; she challenges him at every turn. If he makes a sweeping, blanket statement, she calls him on it. She deconstructs his arguments flawlessly, and not only with logic but with feeling, in equal measures so that he finds himself unable to accuse her of either emotionalism or inhumanity.

He sometimes forgets that she's inhuman at all. It's been ages since he's had someone match him like this, thought for thought and word for word, instead of pulling rank or throwing something to end the debate. It's been ages since someone has _talked_ to him.  
***  
He cancels his next trip to Galactica on the thinnest of excuses. He'll send the paperwork over with the next supply Raptor, and of course the Admiral can call him with any questions.

The Admiral is puzzled, but agrees. Lee knew he would; he can talk circles around his father and snowball the old man with logic, if he puts his mind to it. He simply hasn't bothered to do so for a very long time.  
***  
"So what it comes down to," she says, tilting her head so that her hair falls over her face in a golden wave, "is that you believe people should be free to struggle and hurt each other, while I believe they should be guided to love one another."

"Without freedom, we are nothing," he says, hearing an echo of Tom Zarek in his words and hating himself for it.

She tilts her head the other way and her hair falls back, exposing the fine lines of her features to the harsh light. "Without love we are nothing. You know that better than most, Commander."

He stares at her.

"We have a lot in common, you and I," she says.

This time, he doesn't answer.  
***  
Helo happens to bring the next Raptor over, all easy affability and good nature as ever. He laughs and jokes with the deck crew as they swap what Pegasus can spare for what Galactica has gathered from the fleet, and Lee watches him.

Helo let one of the toasters into his head and his heart both. He fell in love with one, _frakked_ one. Lee's never considered the issue with anything other than disgust, but now he watches Helo and he wonders.

Was it a slow thing, Helo and Sharon? Did she work her way into him gradually, like a cancer? Or was it sudden and absolute, like a bullet?

He doesn't ask. It wouldn't do any good to know.  
***  
"What do you want, Lee?" she asks abruptly.

It's the first time she's used his name, and he's so startled by the sound of it, he forgets to reprimand her and insist on formality. As always, she smiles.

"What do you _want_?" she repeats, shifting slightly in her chair, an almost imperceptible movement that pushes her breasts against the dull gray fabric of the sweatsuit, drawing his eyes despite himself. She told him before, simply and without a hint of shame, that her model was designed to seduce, to play upon the rhythms of the body. In this case, however, forewarned is very much not forearmed.

"What do you want, Lee?"

He doesn't know.  
***  
He's asking the same questions he asked before, in the dead of ship's night, in the dark of his bunk. _What are we fighting for?_ and _Why is it so hard?_ and _Is it ever going to stop?_ and _When can I rest?_

The answers don't come up any better than they did before. The ghosts he used to imagine in this room have faded away, perhaps disgusted with his continued lack of paranoia and steel, but they were never any help anyway.

Sometimes there _is_ no help. Sometimes there _are_ no answers.

Sometimes you have to roll a hard six.  
***  
The Marines let him inside, lock the door, darken the glass, just like every day. This time, though, he doesn't sit. He stands and studies her, then removes his jacket.

"A change of tactics, Commander?" She's still smiling. She has the most beautiful smile. It makes him think of sunlight and it makes him ache inside and the two are the same thing.

He removes the hidden items from the jacket and places them on the table. A knife. A length of optic cable. A wireless transmitter that can reach every computer in the fleet, already set with the codes to breach the firewalls.

"You brought me presents." She smiles even wider. "We knew we could count on you, Lee."

"And why is that?" he asks hoarsely, his chest tight, wanting it to be over. Wanting her to make it happen and be done.

"We've moved among the humans, and we've asked them if they were alive." She draws the knife across her wrist easily and slides the cable inside with none of the discomfort Sharon showed. "We were looking for someone who, deep down inside, wasn't fighting to be."

"I'm tired of fighting," he says. She holds out her hand; he takes it; she pulls him in close.

"You don't have to anymore." She kisses him, sweetly and gently and with all of the love he has forgotten how to feel. Without it, he has been nothing.

He steps back, watches her connect the cable and close her eyes, and waits for the war to end.  



End file.
